The SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence is a huge contribution to our intercultural field, a long overdue volume to which dozens of professionals from multiple disciplines worldwide have contributed. I am honored to be counted among them.
My primary expertise over the three-and-a-half decades of my career has been multicultural, virtual team effectiveness, global managerial competence, and Japan. Thus, when the Encyclopedia’s editor, Janet Bennett, called to ask me to author Communicating Across Cultures with People from Latin America, I was incredibly intimidated.
Latin America (México), has been my home for the past eight years. I absolutely love it here. I frequently travel for work and pleasure to other nations in the region. But Latin America is a fairly new professional topic area for me. However, I agreed to author the entry because I wanted to be sure that this region—so hugely important on the world stage today—was not overlooked.
There are interesting social, environmental, and political movements in Latin America that I don’t see happening elsewhere; the region has a lot to teach the world, an important voice to contribute. Sadly, outsiders often lump the region together into one monolithic whole. Yet the reality is that there is huge diversity within Latin America—and within each country in the region. Heck, it’s hard just to get people to agree which nations are included in “Latin America” and which aren’t!
The Cultural Detective series includes several excellent packages on Latin America, including CD Argentina, CD Brazil, CD Chile, CD Colombia, CD Dominican Republic, CD Mexico, and CD Latino/Hispanic. These are tools to help develop our skills, our abilities to work with and live in harmony with people from these cultures. Thus, they are excellent complements to the academic-oriented, knowledge-based encyclopedia entry.
I highly recommend you purchase the complete two-volume encyclopedia, published by Sage in 2015, or ask your local librarian to add it to their collection. Here’s what Sage says about the full volume:
In 1980, SAGE published Geert Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences. It opens with a quote from Blaise Pascal: “There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees that are falsehoods on the other.” The book became a classic—one of the most cited sources in the Social Science Citation Index—and subsequently appeared in a second edition in 2001. This new SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence picks up on themes explored in that book.
Cultural competence refers to the set of attitudes, practices, and policies that enables a person or agency to work well with people from differing cultural groups. Other related terms include cultural sensitivity, transcultural skills, diversity competence, and multicultural expertise. What defines a culture? What barriers might block successful communication between individuals or agencies of differing cultures? How can those barriers be understood and navigated to enhance intercultural communication and understanding? These questions and more are explained within the pages of this new reference work.
Key Features:
- 300 to 350 entries organized in A-to-Z fashion in two volumes
- Signed entries that conclude with Cross-References and Suggestions for Further Readings
- Thematic “Reader’s Guide” in the front matter grouping related entries by broad topic areas
- Chronology that provides a historical perspective of the development of cultural competence as a discrete field of study
- Resources appendix and a comprehensive Index
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence is an authoritative and rigorous source on intercultural competence and related issues, making it a must-have reference for all academic libraries.
The publishers have given me permission to share my three entries, so here is the link for you to read Communicating Across Cultures with People from Latin America. I would very much like to thank those colleagues who generously shared their expertise, differing viewpoints and experience with me as I worked on this entry: Patricia Coleman, Lucy Linhares, Adriana Medina, Fernando Parrado, and Shirley Saenz. Any errors are, of course, my own, but their input greatly enriched the finished product. Please let me know what you would add or reword!
By the way, if you are interested in Latin America, I invite you to join Fernando Parrado and me for “Latin America and Its Place in World Life” (Session I, Workshop 6) at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication, on the Reed College Campus, Portland, Oregon, July 13-15, 2016.
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